A tokenizer is a tool (software) used for dividing text into tokens. A tokenizer is language specific and takes into account the peculiarities of the language, e.g. don’t in English is tokenized as two tokens.

Sketch Engine contains tokenisers for many languages and also a universal tokenizer used for languages not yet supported by Sketch Engine. The universal tokenizer only recognizes whitespace characters as token boundaries ignoring any language specific rules. This, however, is sufficient for the use of many Sketch Engine features.